And in line 18:
"A mighty fountain momently was forced."
Then in line 27 the poet harks back to an earlier image:
"Then reached the caverns measureless to man";
while earlier in line 24 he reverts to the ill-conditioned adverb of his 18th line:
"It flung up momently the sacred river."
But, as was suggested earlier, the explanation of "Kubla Khan" may be found in its last two lines:
"For he on honey dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
Next in order of composition comes "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," the poem which is the most widely read of any that Coleridge wrote, though it may be doubted whether the full extent of the poet's achievement is grasped by more than a minority of those who know it. The "Ancient Mariner" has many merits; it is one of the greatest ballads in English poetry. The sheer music of the lines, the romance they enshrine, the sense they convey of a vivid description of things actually seen, have given an abridged version of the poem a place in schoolbooks without number, and will probably continue to do so for generations to come, so that "The Mariner" is the first figure of his kind to touch the youthful imagination. Wordsworth has told us how the poem came to be written, when he, his sister Dorothy, and Coleridge had left Stowey to visit the Valley of Rocks, near Linton, on a November day in 1797. They had planned an excursion, and proposed to pay for it out of the proceeds of some poetry then to be written. In the course of the walk Coleridge discussed the poem with his two friends; he was founding it upon the dream of Mr. Cruickshank, a friend of his. Wordsworth, who had been reading a book of travels dealing with a journey round Cape Horn (Shelvocke's Voyage Round the World), suggested the incident of the albatross and the navigation of the ship by dead men. On the same evening the work started, Wordsworth contributing a few lines—less than a dozen at most. A great deal has been written about the Wordsworth contribution, which, upon his own showing, was quite slight in substance, though it was valuable in suggestion. Shelvocke's story of the doubling of Cape Horn and the meeting with albatrosses prompted Wordsworth, and Coleridge may have derived some of his details from a book by Captain Thomas James, published in 1633, and dealing with the "intended discovery of a North-West Passage in to the South Sea." But we are less concerned with this than with the implicit logic that Coleridge has packed into his poem. His vivid imagination traced the whole course of the Ancient Mariner's journey in fashion that demands and will repay the closest observation.